Episode #223 ... Religion and the duck-rabbit - Kyoto School pt. 3
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Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. So there's a quote from one of the members of the Kyoto School we're going to be talking about today. He said, See, today we're going to be talking about the relationship between philosophy and religion, something the Kyoto School was always rethinking as they were doing their work.

And understand exactly what was meant by this quote I just said. Just a heads up: you're gonna need an understanding of the Nishitani episodes we've already done, episodes 216 and 217. You're gonna need to know what's meant by shunyata as an experiential framing or the groundless ground. And you'll also need Nishitani's concept of realization and the double meaning in the way he uses it in his work. From here on out, this episode is written as though you've listened to those two.

But you know what? All that said, I don't even want to start with Nishitani or any of the Kyoto School stuff today. Today I want to start with something simple. I want to give some long-deserved attention to a very important cartoon character that's come to be known as the Duck Rabbit. Who or what is a Duck Rabbit, you may ask? Well, you ever seen one of those optical illusion things where half the people see a duck, half the people see a rabbit when they look at it?

There's tons of these things out there. It can be a sound, it can be a video. The point is, aside from this just being some fun optical thing on a kid's menu at a restaurant, these are things that can show us something important about the way we see the world as human beings. Wittgenstein used the duck rabbit in his work to talk about the meanings of words.

But the duck rabbit as a metaphor can actually be useful for all sorts of situations when we want to get out of seeing things in a classic, dualistic, theoretical abstract framing of the world like we've been talking about on this show lately. And I'd like to take this moment to empathize with a certain kind of person out there listening to this series so far. This kind of person may say, look, I hear you, okay, where you keep talking about these different framings of our reality, where one is a rational, utilitarian framing. We create systems out of abstractions. I get that one.

But then you start talking about this phenomenological framing. Sometimes you say embodied framing. Sometimes you'll even say religious framing, where apparently in this type of awareness, we're not breaking things down in this theoretical way anymore. Apparently this is more of a pre-theoretical, more immediate connection to the world around us. I mean, I hear you when you say all this, but I gotta be honest, I don't see it. Not only do I not see it, I don't know how to imagine my reality, not chopping it up into abstract concepts and then making sense of it.

I mean, I want to remain open here, but when you just start talking about religion, and then you also start talking about how we can't describe this framing of the world using, you know, words, my BS meter just starts going off. I'm sorry. I mean, if this is such an eminent aspect of our experience, then why can't I see this framing of things right in front of me? Well, consider the duck rabbit for a minute as an example.

Somebody can look at the duck rabbit for the first time, and they might clearly see the thing that's drawn on the piece of paper as a duck. And if they were never told it's possible to see this image in any other way, they might only see the duck every time they look at it. But then once they're told that some people see a rabbit when they look at the picture,

Well, then they can be confused. Like, "I just don't see it." They can strain and look really hard for how this could ever be a rabbit, but still only see a duck. But then there's the moment, ah, where they see the rabbit for the first time. And then it can be hard for them to go back to seeing the duck. They keep practicing at this. There could even be a point where they start to be able to freely switch between seeing it as a duck or seeing it as a rabbit.

Well, consider this as a metaphor for the different experiential framings of reality we've been talking about. It could be that you're having a hard time seeing the rabbit, and it's not because you're a bad person or a stupid person or too smart of a person to see this delusional rabbit that other people are talking about. It's possible it's hard for you to see the rabbit because you live in a world where you're surrounded by ducks, and it's a world that often incentivizes seeing the duck instead of the rabbit.

Similarly, though, there can be a moment where some other way of viewing things snaps into focus for you. You all of a sudden see things around you in a different way. And like that moment with the duck rabbit, it becomes evident to you. This was something that was always there right in front of you. You just didn't see it until now. And now you can't unsee it.

And coming from this dualistic framing of the world, we typically do, imagine the kinds of things that people might say when they're struggling to see the rabbit. They might say, look, there's only one reality out there, okay? This thing either needs to be a duck or it needs to be a rabbit. It literally cannot be both of those. That's a logical contradiction. You know, the limitations of this dualistic framing.

Well, the question to consider right now is: what if we're always doing this, this thing we're doing with the duck rabbit, to some extent when it comes to our framing of the world? What if this isn't just an optical trick or some freak moment with a duck rabbit, but what if this simple image is illustrating something important to us about the way we frame every moment of our experience? Or if we open ourselves to see it more in this non-dualistic way, not only do the duck and the rabbit start to not look like contradictions of each other,

But they start to look like things that actually require each other for them to exist in the way they do. The duck co-constitutes the rabbit and vice versa. Even more than that, you can start to wonder, what if there isn't really a formal essence of a duck or a rabbit at all? You can ask, what is my experience of this moment I'm having when I'm not trying to frame it in terms of it being a duck or a rabbit all the time? Maybe the biggest mystery of all here is, what could any of this have to do with the relationship between philosophy and religion?

Let's get into it. So Keiji Nishitani, as we know, thought a lot about religion in his work. And he's somebody that no doubt, if he could see the modern world and the state of the discussion that often goes on among people about religion, he'd no doubt be pretty disappointed. Because like we talked about in one of the earlier episodes, when you ask a question like, what is religion? Nishitani doesn't think there's an easy answer to that question. I mean, basically everyone out there has thoughts on what religion is if you ask them. But how many of those people have really examined it closely?

And if we're trying to get a more full picture of what religion is, we can't just stop short with what's probably most of the discussion that goes on about religion these days. You know, these days you have a good amount of people who are either atheists, who will write off religion entirely as just being a bunch of nonsense, or there's also a good amount of people who call themselves religious, put in very little work into their faith, and mostly just use religion as something that's useful to them, where it's how they secure their spot in heaven, or it's their way to answer difficult questions, whatever it is.

Well, the problem with this Tanisha Tani, as we know, is that both of these manage to completely avoid the deeper and more interesting lines of thought that are possible when you take religion actually seriously. See, Tanisha Tani, to even begin to start answering the question, what is religion, in a remotely detailed way,

Well, to start, you'd have to at least do a philosophical analysis of religion, not to mention an analysis of the history of religion and what it's actually been to people in their lived experience for thousands of years. You'd have to take seriously what was meant when, for example, a fourth century Christian mystic describes their communion with God. Like, what do they really mean when they say that? Then you'd have to compare that to maybe the experience of a Zen monk, their daily practice, their approach to how they view enlightenment.

Then you'd have to compare that to what's meant by a Sufi when they claim to have annihilated their own ego in the presence of divine love. What I mean is you'd have to consider religion in a multi-dimensional way: as a source of meaning, as a mode of disciplined practice, as a political tool, as a framework for the glue that holds society together. In other words, if you want to respect the question "What is religion truly?"

Well, this whole thing would be a very big job for someone to do, something some people have dedicated their entire lives to. And the point is, coming up with an answer to what is religion is not just looking around you at a handful of religious people that you happen to have met in your life so far,

and then being like, "Yeah, these people basically represent everything religion stands for. Seems about right." No, just think of what kind of mistakes you could be making there. Like, would you ever feel like you knew everything there was to know about constructing things just because you met a couple douchey construction workers in your life? I mean, if you're born into the modern United States, for example, something you might see around you a lot are people that say that if you want to be considered a religious person, all you gotta do is believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ.

In other words, a core component of this type of religious experience, some would say the most important component, is belief in something. As long as up in your head somewhere you are assenting to a belief in the correct religious object, that's the thing that matters.

to the point where it's not uncommon to see people in the United States who act like very good people, their behaviors align with a religious community like this, but if they haven't been saved by Jesus yet, if they don't believe, well, they're met with skepticism, where at the same time, somebody can be treating people around them in very bad ways, but as long as they believe in the right thing, well, that's just one of our fellow Christians who's struggling right now.

I mean, if it was possible to reduce religion down to this, it's no wonder so many people would look at religion and think it lacks anything to do with moral accountability. It's also no wonder why they might think it's a bit silly. Like, what? I just believe in this thing hard enough and that's what really matters to you people? And look, even more than this, if you only met people like this throughout your life and you concluded that this is mostly what religion has to offer...

Well, you might be surprised to find out that this is actually nothing like what most religious experiences have been over the course of human history. That this is actually a very modern, post-enlightenment, post-Protestant Reformation, really, version of a religious experience. See, for anyone unaware, during the Protestant Reformation, when Martin Luther writes his 95 Theses, sends these corrections to the church, shakes up the whole Western religious world,

That was an event that would start a multi-century shift of what it was to have a run-of-the-mill religious experience in European and then later American Christianity. What was once a situation where most people didn't speak Latin and were unable to even read the scripture they were following, Luther talked about creating what he called a priesthood of all believers. And what this led to is that more so than ever before in the world after this, people began to think of their religious experience as a personal connection that they have to a God.

It started to become more common to speak to God directly during this time, to interpret the Bible personally when deciding what your relationship to God is. But this was not the common way it was to be a Christian before this. And when the individualism of the Enlightenment comes along, and the rise of liberalism in the West, this notion that my religious identity is grounded in an individual belief I have as a subject about some religious object is

Well, you can just see the Enlightenment written all over this kind of thinking, as well as how it mirrors other conversations about identity that would come out of Enlightenment-style thinking as well. The idea is that my religion is really an aspect of my individual identity, and that religious identity is ultimately something that's decided by my choice to be it up in my head. And this becomes more and more pronounced as a core piece of what it is to be this type of Christian as the years go on.

And for whatever it's worth, Dostoevsky, who we've been talking about lately, thought that the Protestant Reformation was a huge step in the wrong direction for Christianity, hence his commitment to Orthodox Christianity. Because the fact is, for most people who have ever considered themselves religious on this planet, religion has not primarily been about a belief in something. In fact, as far as we can tell, for most of human history, whether or not you really believed in the God status of something didn't really matter as much as how you treated people.

In other words, daily practice was more of what mattered. Religion was more defined by how you engaged in the roles of your community and the religious traditions and the rituals around you. And your identity was not something that was determined by some belief you had about yourself or some divine object. Identity was something that exuded out of you as you lived a religious practice every day. In fact, just to contrast this dynamic with something, you know, how removed this approach to religion is from a daily religious practice,

Consider the world of Keiji Nishitani and how different it was. You know, early 20th century Japan is a place where Japan's facing an enormous amount of pressure internally to modernize and catch up, quote unquote, with the rest of the world. And as they're doing this, they're looking at every way the Japanese culture functions and comparing it to the way that European culture functions as they try to take stuff from it.

Well, when they do this comparison, Nishitani realizes on his end that when it comes to the word religion, at least in the way that the word religion is being used by Europeans, the Japanese language doesn't even have a word at this point to describe exactly what these Europeans are talking about.

See, there's so much historical baggage that's connected to their word religion, not the least of which is this Enlightenment-era baggage where faith and reason, religion and philosophy, these are not just separated from each other, but these are often pitted as antagonistic to each other.

I mean, broadly speaking, from a more European use of these terms, philosophy and religion at the time, the religion side of things would be the practice, you know, the meeting up in church, rituals, the confessional, daily prayer, whatever it was. And the philosophy side of it would be more the metaphysics that underlied the religious practice, the conceptual analysis of the world. Philosophy is the deep reflection some thinkers do on the nature of what is.

But again, compare this to some of the traditions of Nishitani's Japan, Zen Buddhism as one example of them. Well, in Zen Buddhism, there isn't some strict separation between the daily practice of a follower and the philosophy of shunyata that underlies it.

I mean, for thousands of years, can you imagine the idea that you'd be meditating for hours, reciting koans every day, questioning the nature of the self, deepening your experiential understanding of the groundless ground of reality, and the idea that that's the religious practice. Oh, and then there's this totally separate thing that we call the philosophy of shunyata. It's like, no. To Nishitani, whatever the Europeans have been calling separately philosophy and religion for so many years...

he realizes that for the Japanese, this has been more of a unified tradition, a tradition where it feels pretty impossible for these two to be seen as totally separate from each other. And this brings us to the quote that we talked about at the beginning of the episode, said by the great philosopher and scholar of Zen Buddhism, Hisamatsu Shinichi, one of the big inspirations of Nishitani, it should be said.

He said that religion without philosophy is blind and philosophy without religion is vacuous. Now, of course, this is alluding to how these two things are more linked than we typically realize in the West. But it's also speaking to the point that either of these two, if they were isolated and without the other one, kind of like the duck rabbit, they would just be missing something deeply important about the very process that makes them what they are.

Shinichi talks about it more in the longer section of this famous quote. He says, quote, philosophy seeks to know the ultimate, religion seeks to live it.

Yet for the whole human being, the two must be non-dualistically of one body and cannot be divided. If religion is isolated from philosophy, it falls into ignorance, superstition, fanaticism, or dogmatics. If philosophy is alienated from religion, it loses nothing less than its life." Consider the first sentence of that: "Philosophy seeks to know the ultimate; religion seeks to live it." Well, sounds a lot like the line of thinking we've been talking about in Dostoevsky lately, doesn't it?

I mean, if philosophy, as it's traditionally been done in the West, is a type of conceptual engineering where it creates concepts, analyzes the connections between concepts, all in an attempt to capture truth in whatever way words are capable of,

Well then look, that may be one of the most important things we can possibly do. And it may be something that underlies all other fields of study. But it still is something that's limited to concepts. Or in other words, it's something that's limited to a theoretical abstract framing of our reality and how those pieces connect together within a larger system. But consider how necessary it is to not just spend your life constantly system building. To not just spend your life only looking at the duck on the piece of paper.

You know, I think especially if you're a really smart person who solves most of your problems in life by being really good at this system building, it can feel like, look, anything I need to know about the world, well, I can get there by just reflecting on the world more. That's how you solve problems in life. But there's a certain point that reflection alone, as great as it is sometimes, you don't affirm reality and embody the truth just by filtering it through an ever more complicated philosophical system. More philosophy now!

No, at a certain point, you have to stop doing philosophy and start with what many people throughout history have called a religious practice. And I know the word may make you cringe out there, but just think of how necessary it is to do something along the lines of what Simone Weil called in her work a negative effort. It's an effort to take a break from the otherwise constant system building that we're doing.

And it's an effort to not add anything, but to remove the existing set of filters we typically have on. It's an effort to learn to receive a less abstract framing of our reality, to make space for the imminent nature of reality to shine through more clearly. And you know, this is why so many contemplative practices focus on the quieting of the mind as a key starting point. It's not necessarily to rid you of your anxiety or to 4X your productivity this quarter, though surely that is why a lot of people get into this stuff.

But this is about getting used to receiving reality and affirming it as it is, rather than the otherwise constant cycle of idealizing the world or demonizing it or rationalizing about the things we have to do. See, it's not until the mind is quiet, they will say, that anyone can ever understand this connection to what's often called the eternal now, where the present moment is literally all there is in this framing.

And just so we don't kind of interrupt the show at any point beyond this, I want to thank everybody that goes through the sponsors of the show today. For an ad-free experience, patreon.com slash philosophize this.

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And couldn't we also call philosophy the attempt to know the truth and conceptually articulate what we can about it?

More than that, wouldn't these two activities be massively helpful to each other? I mean, what person would ever try to separate them? And to get back to Shinichi's larger point here, I mean, you can imagine how if someone just tried to live their life solely in a religious dimension, didn't take the time to frame this religious experience in terms of knowledge, if a religious person doesn't deeply engage with philosophy, then they just inevitably fall into ignorance, superstition, fanaticism, etc.,

But it goes the other way too for Shinichi. If you're a philosopher and all you do is try to conceptually frame the world instead of trying to live it and embody it, then it's very common for this kind of thinking to just turn into hollow intellectualism. This often ends up becoming someone who feels lost. The results of their thinking feel vacuous. They arrive at conclusions that don't change anything about how they really live. And a lot of the time, this is someone that's left feeling completely dead inside.

See, these two different ways of framing our reality, like the duck rabbit, these are not opposites. And they're certainly not an either-or thing to Nishitani. And to him, it's very important, especially in the kind of societies that are emerging in the modern world, for us to realize this connection between philosophy and religion. It's one of the things we've definitely lost over the years, he thinks. And it's one of the most crucial things for us to have a daily practice to try to remember.

And while he'd probably say that the main way a modern person can benefit from understanding it is through a deep existential engagement with both of these fields, if you wanted to learn more about this outside of the lived experience domain, what one useful thing can be to study and reflect on the work of one of these people that have asked the question, what is religion, and then dedicated their entire lives to studying it. And one of Nishitani's favorites in this department is going to be a philosopher by the name of Frederick Schelling.

Now I feel the need to say here, Schelling is a man whose work is very complicated. His work changes significantly from his earlier work into his later work.

And even if it didn't, this is a man who starts his career as a German idealist, in many ways responding to the problems he saw in the work of Hegel. So what that means is he's existing at a time that requires quite a bit of prior knowledge to even understand why he would care about a lot of the stuff he does. There's no way I can cover it all today, but I am hoping I can show you a couple exciting things about his work from this line of conversation we're having.

as well as why Nishitani, living over a hundred years after Schelling, still draws on his work for inspiration, though ultimately thinking he was limited on many of his conclusions.

See, Schelling is somebody that's kind of like Dostoevsky in a way, and that he sees the decline of religion and the church coming way ahead of time before most people even realize there's going to be a problem. I saw it put one time that Frederick Schelling's living during a time in history where he thought it was becoming harder and harder for someone to be a religious person by simply just going to church and following the normal religious activities.

and he sees this as a potential crisis. I mean, religion has served a critical function in people's lives up until this point in Europe. And again, this sparks in Schelling a similar line of questioning during his time that Nishitani would find so crucial for Japan during the beginning of the 20th century.

What is religion, first of all? And to what extent can the conceptual analysis of philosophy disclose religion in a way that's accurate? More than that, in what ways can philosophy be a bridge for people between what he calls the world of the knowable, a world that can be framed and articulated, and the unknowable, the part of existence that has to be experienced and embodied to be witnessed?

Well, the first thing to maybe say, to try to bring up to speed on a complicated thinker like Schelling, is to compare him to somebody we already know. In his later work, he does bear a certain kind of resemblance to Nishitani, in that he thinks that when it comes to religion, absolute nothingness, or what he calls the unground in his work, the groundless ground, is going to play a central role in understanding what a religious practice is truly a reflection of. So when I say absolute nothingness,

This is a nothingness that's along similar lines to the emptiness of shunyata. This is a no-thingness. And don't get me wrong, Schelling's nothingness is not the exact same as a Buddhist take on this. But in terms of the comparisons I could give you here to bring you into this conversation about Schelling, it is far more accurate to compare this nothingness to Buddhism than basically anything you're ever going to find in Western philosophy that we've talked about.

See, for Schelling, absolute nothingness is a reference to the conditions that allow for existence to unfold into the future. That there is no independent existence of people, things, nature, whatever it is. And the part of this that makes this different from Buddhism is that for Schelling, all of these things are part of a dynamic, self-revealing process that is constantly moving towards something. And this progression towards something is going to be a very important part of his work.

Now, some of the implications for this idea then is that history for him, you know, if you're just studying human history, well, you're really just studying the ways that human consciousness has unfolded as one piece of this universal process. And for Schelling, if we want to understand how this universal process is unfolding, we

Well, first things first, we can never understand the totality of it just through abstract concepts like the ones that are used in philosophy. That much like Nishitani's point about shunyata, absolute nothingness in Schelling's work resists categorization and can't be fully captured in these philosophical terms. Still though for him, human events and ideas are a particularly accessible access point we have if we ever wanted to study just a humble piece of this absolute nothingness.

Well, I'm sure you can see where this is going. A very important thing that we can study when it comes to human ideas is going to be religion. Because religion, for any given time period that it's in for Schelling, religion is an expression of humanity's relationship to this absolute nothingness.

A relationship that is always evolving and becoming more sophisticated, so much so that if you look at the history of religious practice, from the primitive mystery cults all the way to modern-day monotheistic Christianity, all of this has been a progression for Schelling towards a greater and greater understanding of the nature of absolute nothingness as framed by religious practice.

And he'll go into all sorts of examples of this progression in his later work. You know, he talks about these ancient mystery religions that there used to be, the Semithracian practice or the Eleusinian practice in Greece.

Where, you know, far from these being about a belief in any sort of religious object out there, these were religions that were centered around trying to access the mysterious, unknowable aspects of our own existence. Where the whole experience was actually pretty crazy. You know, people would volunteer. They would be put through a secret, intense ritual practice in these religions,

In fact, sometimes there'd be the death penalty if someone revealed what some of these secret rituals were. And from what little we know, you know, what's been leaked out over the years, they'd apparently take these people on things like a 20-mile hike. They'd have them carry some giant heavy thing, like a religious artifact. They'd put them in the elements. Psychedelics, it's believed, were often a part of this process. The point is...

these rituals would bring people to a place they'd never been before in their own mind, with the logic of the religious practice being that there are certain insights into what existence is that can only be experienced. So come along with us and we're going to give you that experience. And these mystery religions were apparently early ways to shelling very primitive ways of that same desire we have to gain access to these deeper truths about absolute nothingness, these mysteries.

Another example, a bit later on in history, Schelling says, were the great polytheistic attempts at conveying absolute nothingness. And they did this very effectively for their time with things like the god of the sun, the god of the sea, pantheons of gods sometimes.

But then eventually, he says, humanity's relationship to nothingness progresses again, where upon further analysis and experience of this absolute nothingness, they realize that behind the sun and the sea and these various gods actually lies the same exact source of becoming. And this shift in religious consciousness is going to become the rise of monotheism in the Western world.

And even within monotheism, with Christianity being just one example of it, Schelling thinks that if you do the work, you can still observe various different distinct periods of how Christianity is practiced that correspond to different stages of our growing relationship to absolute nothingness. For example, he talks about how early Christianity can be thought of as the era of the Book of Peter, meaning many of the most influential passages from the theology of this time are taken from the example of Peter as an apostle.

Now it's because of this inspiration that this is a time where Christianity largely spreads by conquest. The goal in part at this time is to create a Christian empire and ultimately for Christianity to occupy more physical space in the world. In other words, for Schelling, this is a metaphysics of our religious consciousness that prioritizes space during this time. And you can see an example there of the philosophy that underlies a religion being inseparable from the religious practice.

But then later Christianity, Schelling says, changed a lot. It eventually develops into an era that more centers around passages from the Gospel of Paul. Now this becomes an era of practice where it isn't so much about spreading Christianity externally anymore. Now we're more focused on the internal experience of the religious person, especially when it comes to the importance of concepts like faith and grace, he says.

But once again, the conceptual framing or the philosophy of this period of religious practice is very revealing if you do the work for Schelling. And for whatever it's worth, this, the era of Paul, was the period that Schelling thought that he was living in. Now again, Schelling thinks that all of this is heading towards a greater and greater understanding of this absolute nothingness. So the question you can ask him here is, what's next?

I mean, if you got such an accurate read on the history of religion, Schelling, what is the next evolution of religious thinking that we can all look forward to? Well, Schelling believed that one possible answer to that would be an age of religious practice that centers more around the Gospel of John, or in the Gospel of John, when he says things like, I and the Father are one. Well, relative to the other Gospels, there are far more passages from John you could focus

on, that align a new way of framing Christian religious practice that doesn't break our view of the world down into so many rigid dualities. See, there's tons of dualistic ways that Christians will break down their experience of reality. You have good and evil, being and non-being, and probably one of the most influential of these, at least in the everyday life of a Christian and how they view things, is this famous distinction they make between the sacred and the profane.

What I'm saying is Schelling thinks it's possible, and even likely, that we are moving into a direction in the world when it comes to religion where the classic distinction in Christianity between God and the world is not a valid distinction anymore. That the two of these will be reimagined as co-constituting one another, not unlike our example of the duck rabbit.

See, this whole idea that God or divinity is something that exists out there, not of this world, and the idea that this world, you know, this world is in many ways the problem. This world is in need of saving. It's the realm of the profane. And divinity is the realm of the sacred.

Well this whole duality of the religious experience of an average Christian is something that Schelling thinks might not always be there. That again, there are plenty of passages in the Bible, especially surrounding the Apostle John, that can move this religious practice into a direction where the sacred or the groundless ground is actually part of the experience of what we call the profane. In other words, this would be an era of Christianity for Schelling.

where the metaphysics are very different, more along the lines of God is imminently all around you. That there's no true separation between the sacred and the profane, and where the path to the sacred is not through conquest or through some internal belief you have, but through opening your awareness to see that the sacred is actually among us. See, that is also something Christianity has the potential to look like to Schelling, and maybe one day in the future this will be more of a core focus for an average Christian.

And if you're someone who's born into this world and you look around you at the religious options you have, and you think a lot of them look like ancient relics of the past, you know, outdated, tribalistic, painfully simple in terms of framing this connection to the unfolding of reality. Well, hearing this from Schelling, that you may just be somebody that's born during a big transition period between a shift in religious consciousness. Well, I'd imagine it can almost feel to some people like you've been robbed of a religious connection to the world that may have been possible for you.

Now, this might be where it's useful to bring Nishitani back into the episode. See, as interesting as all this is from Schelling, how would Nishitani be thinking as a fellow scholar of religion about what he's saying here? Well, obviously he thinks Schelling is an absolutely brilliant thinker in general. I mean, this is clearly someone who's sensing the importance of deeply examining religion.

But ultimately for Nishitani, Schelling is living during a time where he can't help but to smuggle in all sorts of things from the way people used to do philosophy during the time he lived. For example, Nishitani thinks all of this from Schelling is a bit too human-centric in a way that he just doesn't think is fully correct. You know, coming from a more Mahayana Buddhist background where there's just more of an equal level of consideration given to non-human animals and non-sentient beings as well.

He also has a problem with how Schelling brings in this grand teleology that he thinks all the events of the universe are apparently moving towards. That's also something he thinks there's no reason to assume, but again, understandable for his time. More than that he doesn't like, how Schelling grounds this all in history, as though religious development and revelation is something where we're just waiting around for it to be revealed to us at some unknown future date. And I mean, of course Nishitani wouldn't agree with a piece of it like that. He thought that religious insight like that

was something that was eminently available to everyone. And that if you really are someone who sees human history as slowly uncovering some truth about the nature of how existence unfolds, well, Tanisha Tani, that says a whole lot more about the filters that you still have on in your own experiential framing of the world, not the universe itself. No, shunyata, Tanisha Tani, is eminent all around you.

And look, studying the history of these religious practices like Schelling did may be an important step for a lot of people in becoming more aware of this other way of framing things. It may very well be the equivalent of saying, hey, some people out there look at the duck and see a rabbit instead.

But I hope this conversation today brings at least some proper context to the project of the Kyoto School. You know, when you hear someone say that the Kyoto School is made up of Japanese thinkers that were engaging with existentialism and German idealism, where then by noticing the limitations in them, as well as the limitations in their own ideas, they then tried to reimagine all this to create something totally new moving forward. I hope when you hear that, this clarifies why just studying history will never be able to give you the full picture of any of these things.

And on that same note, I hope it's clear that from Nishitani's perspective, religion and philosophy need each other. They rely on each other. Not unlike our friend from the beginning of the episode, the duck rabbit. Anyway, hope you enjoyed this. Patreon.com slash philosophize this if you value the show as an educational resource. Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.